Computing and network resources are subject to wide fluctuations in demand. For example, a computing system or a component thereof (e.g., a CPU or memory) can experience fluctuations from little to no load in the early morning hours or on weekends, to very high loads during late afternoon, weekday usage, or during the evening hours when many computing systems are programmed to perform high volume calculations and other data processing. Likewise, user demand on Internet or other network resources (e.g., a server or host computer) depend on a variety of factors such as the number of users or the time of day. In addition, traffic to a particular Internet site can start out slow and due to advertising, linking, etc., grow exponentially in a short period of time. The timing of such increases in demand are often difficult to predict, making it difficult to anticipate or plan for the computing and/or network resource capacity which is necessary to meet the demand at any given time.
One solution is to provide more resource capacity (e.g., more CPUs, more servers, etc.) than is estimated to be necessary for normal conditions. However, such over-allocation of resources can be costly and unnecessary. In addition, many small or start-up companies may not be able to afford extra resources until, for example, sales volume increases. Therefore, another solution is to provide both active resources and reserve resources, where the active resources are sufficient for typical demand and the reserve resources are only activated when there is a peak in demand (i.e., “capacity-on-demand”). However, current approaches to capacity-on-demand require manual intervention to activate an additional resource. That is, before the active resources reach capacity, the user must contact the vendor and obtain a code to “unlock” and activate the additional resource. Therefore, an administrator must be “on-call” at all times during operation (i.e., twenty-four hours every day, seven days a week) to monitor the active resources and activate reserve resources as necessary. In addition, sudden spikes in demand that require immediate deployment of an additional resource can cause interruptions in service before the additional resource can be activated.
It is therefore a primary object of this invention to provide the resource capacity that is necessary to meet fluctuations in user demand dynamically or automatically. Another object of the invention is to automatically activate a reserve resource when additional resource capacity is required to meet demand.